Wednesday, 25 April 2007

The Villains in my Home Town- part 9.

H ere are my quickest courtroom sketches. The real challenge in this game is that the thing isn't set up to make the sketcher's life easy; sometimes we feel like we're stealing it. This first was our parish priest as per my anecdote here. Judge Shanahan's assistant came and ordered me out as the judge would not tolerate journalists on the floor of his courtroom. The problem was that the accused was invisible from the gallery, and I figured my insignificant problem probably wasn't up for discussion. I infiltrated the circle of the accused's legal representatives long enough, perhaps eight minutes, to get a pencil drawing which I then coloured outside. He was found guilty of sexual assault upon young boys and was "being held in custody until sentencing on friday."

The judge is a pal of my father in law, and whenever Jack was in town and off to meet him for a drink I'd say "ask him about the time he had me thrown out of court." I don't know if he did ask, or if the judge is still around. For good measure I nipped up to the gallery, from where at least the judge was visible, and got a thumbnail of Shanahan in the corner of the same sheet of paper.The picture was caught obliquely on the corner of the screen before the camera zoomed in, so the focus in this image is weak.

With this other one I had even less time. The Harley Davidson store was robbed by six armed men and some $30,000 worth of parts was stolen. An arsenal of guns was found in the car of one of the accused. These two were arraigned before the magistrate and a trial date set. I had approximately four minutes to get them both. Presumably it's necessary for the faces to be obscured until the time of trial. I don't know how this one ended. The camera zoomed for a couple of good deatils, but we overlooked making jpegs of those.

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My pal white showed me the new Jeffrey Brown that will be in the upcoming Deevee. There are forty panels per page for three pages. Here's an extract from the first tier of page 1. it gets sex-crazy after that.